Shinzo wo Sasageyo

This exciting x15 trk release from period ensemble Musica Fiata is a rare treat, featuring the work of composer Johann Hermann Schein (1586-1630) and the heterogeneous collection of motets that make up his Cymbalum Sionium. Although Cymbalum Sionium has always attracted musicological interest, performances of most works have been very rare up until now. Schein’s melodic gifts, harmonic sensitivity as well as feeling for varied affects and great sense of structure enabled him to absorb all so many musical influences influences, imbuing them with the freshness of a gifted young composer creating music which still moves us today.

Nikolaus Harnoncourt and Gustav Leonhardt were at the forefront of the early music movement that swept classical music in the '70s and '80s, performing pieces from the canon with period instruments in order to re-create the original intent of the composer as closely as possible. And their most enduring legacy is right here, the complete survey of Bach's sacred cantatas that they began in 1971 and completed in 1988.

After their Gramophone Award-winning debut recital of songs by Beethoven, and a double album of Hugo Wolf’s ‘Mörike Lieder’ (with Joan Rodgers), Stephan Genz and Roger Vignoles return to Wolf for the much less well-known early songs to texts by Heinrich Heine and Nikolaus Lenau. It is likely that these little-known songs were recorded here for the first time.

Gustav Leonhardt began recording Bach's secular cantatas on Philips in 1990 after completing the sacred cantatas cycle with Harnoncourt. Those Philips discs were well received but are now hard to find, either on CD or as downloads, so I was thrilled to discover that Leonhardt, now 80, just recorded another pair of Bach's secular cantatas.

This 1990 Digital Recording is a must for Bach's CD Collector. Recorded using historic organs on which some were played himself by Bach. Marie-Claire Alain's playing here is more in historic and faithful to performance practice. The tempos and the registrations are well planned and the approach of playing is spontaneous and simple. The spirituality of the performer is so evident here.

This wonderful new recording of the St Matthew Passion is the first to adopt Bach’s final revisions to the score as performed in 1742. Most casual listeners may not be able to identify the departure in scoring from the most commonly performed 1736 version: which amounts to the replacement of organ with harpsichord in the second orchestra, and an additional viola da gamba in a recitative and aria. However, where this recording really stands out is in the size of the vocal forces. A total of eight singers are employed, therefore providing just four voices for each of the two choirs. This arrangement clearly has potential disadvantages for those of us raised on the full chorus monumental direction from the likes of Richter and Klemperer. On the other hand, and as John Butt points out in his informative essay, there might be an aesthetic advantage in hearing the voices ‘as individuals constituting a group rather than simply as a crowd’.